Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a long piece called “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …”, which begins with these very words:
In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and w

In 2012, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two econ professors at George Mason University, launched Marginal Revolution University (otherwise known as MRUniversity) which delivers free, interactive courses in the economics space.

I know, it’s a dated reference now, but since I still watch the remade Battlestar Galactica series on Netflix, the mystical refrain—“All of this has happened before and will happen again”–still seems fresh to me. At any rate, it’s fresher than the clichéd “history repeats itself.

Yesterday, E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth was released as a free iBook on iTunes. It features “state-of-the-art digital media animations, video, and interactive modules in a comprehensive 41-chapter text covering standards-based biology curriculum.

We reached a little milestone this week. Our big list of Free Online Courses now features 1,000 courses from top universities. Let’s quickly break things down for you: The list lets you download audio & video lectures from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Harvard.

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About Us

Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.